You can’t stop time, people. The wheel is turning and it will continue to turn, autumn becoming winter, bodies becoming dust, until Christmas is here and with it that clove-scented reminder that another year is almost over and death comes for all.

Is this why we choose to lean on tradition, on comforts that mean even as time passes we have something that always remains the same? Except, like a fantasy that gets dimmer with every use, a photocopy of a photocopy, the traditions of our childhoods are both too precious and too shitty to do their job any more. We must have turkey on Christmas Day, and wear the bobbly slipper socks, and watch the sad episode of The Royle Family and have a fight about the price of things, because that is what we have always done so that is what we do.

But as old traditions wear out, new ones emerge to patch them up. In recent years the Christmas sandwich (formerly something you’d cobble together in an old roll, pissed at midnight) has become one such tradition, its main selling points being that it exists for office workers rather than families, and that they can enjoy it from November. To work in an office is to dance on the head of a single question from 9am, and that question is, “What’s for lunch?” We are institutionalised to the point that our stomach growls sync up, and this combined with Christmas coming means the annual announcement that Pret’s menu has bells on it again causes a sort of mass delirium.

As I digested my fourth sandwich, I started to regret the whole project

The absolute state of my colleagues when I piled this season’s sandwiches at the end of our bank of desks this week. It was as if a unicorn had climbed up there on top of the magazines and given birth, and the babies were singing The Greatest Love Of All. Every year the supermarkets get more and more creative, a Yorkshire pudding popped in here, a jus ladled on there. M&S has done one that looks like a festive breast, and it is charming. Some are simply vile, a brioche of farts microwaved on an airplane; some have a strange bitterness to them, as if seasoned with crayons. Some are nice. In short: 1) Pret does the best vegetarian one this year, mainly because it’s the only one not bleeding cranberry sauce. 2) M&S has tried the hardest with its tit bun – it has tiny stars embedded in the top, and the filling is modest but tasty, and all these things are appreciated. 3) Greggs’s turkey option is genuinely lovely, if basic, but aren’t we all at this time of year? 4) Oh my God, there is one redacted wrap that tastes like Ribena baklava, dense and red, the consistency of the turd of a supermarket Santa who’s eaten only pudding since the clocks went back, and this I wouldn’t recommend.

As I digested my fourth sandwich, teeth grimly grinding the turkey into Christmas paste, eyes glazed like a ham, I started to regret the whole project. Because what became clear about the effect of the new tradition for Christmas sandwiches every November is that by trying to replicate the experience of a family meal at our desk, we’re inoculating ourselves against taste, a series of festive flu jabs. By eating these sandwiches, essentially bread, mayo, space meat, jam, bit of old sausage, mayo, bread, we’re teaching our poor mouths that this is what a Christmas dinner should taste like.

Eat them like I have, and by the time 24 December comes round, and you’ve wheeled your suitcase on to the train and woken the next morning in a blow-up bed under a Scott and Charlene poster, and put on those bobbly slipper socks you got in your stocking the year your dad took redundancy, and sat down at the table with all its leaves extended, in front of an actual plate of Christmas dinner, you’ll be a bit, well… A bit, “Would you mind awfully if I slopped a tablespoon of jam on top, crushed it in the fridge for 24 hours under a duvet of mayonnaise and ate it outside on a bench?”

The problem with festive traditions is how quickly we leap to embrace them, to catch, pin and repeat them in order to, what, stuff up the huge holes in our winter psyches? Create meaning between cold bread? After eating 5,000 calories in white meat and brie, Christmas sandwiches are threatening to kill Christmas for me. So I’m cutting down on traditions – no cranberry till January. While I do enjoy the stuffing, I miss the joy.